Campfire Apps

Last weekend the Campfire Apps team attended Education Hack Day at Digital Harbor High School in Baltimore. The event was a weekend-long hack-a-thon where teachers paired with developers in teams to produce products to match ideas teachers submitted for ways that technology could enhance their classrooms. The event was the first of its kind in Baltimore and was a great success.

It was wonderful to see so many people working hard together over the weekend to develop products that can be really useful to teachers and educators. There were a ton of great ideas that were pitched and at the end of the weekend there were 10 final products that were demonstrated.

We worked on our first app to be released for teachers, What’s Due?. This app is an assignment tracking app for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Teachers will be able to track assignments by student and sent alerts and reminders when assignments are due, plus much more. It is not complete just yet, but we hope to have it available for download next month.

We had a great time over the weekend working on the app. Our team consisted of Shawn and myself, my sister Jackie – who is pursuing a Master’s in Teaching in Social Studies, and our new intern Rahul. On Saturday, Jackie, Shawn, and I hashed out our idea and started deciding on features for the app. Jackie and I then started wireframing the app with paper and pencil. Shawn began storyboarding the app in the development program and worked on this until 4:30 Sunday morning! I worked on the artwork and interface elements last Saturday night. Then, Sunday afternoon Rahul joined us and helped Shawn with the programming in order to enable us to have a working demo for the presentations. Jackie joined us for a once over before the presentations began and then Shawn and I presented our demonstration to the audience.

Alas, we didn’t win, but we had an awesome time and it was such a great event, we were honored to be a part of it all. You can read more about the event on The Baltimore Sun’s website and the Education Hack Day’s website. You can see a few screenshots that we shared of the app What’s Due? on our Facebook page.

This year Campfire Apps will be proudly participating in the Education Hack Day in Baltimore. The Education Hack Day is “a 2-day hack-a-thon focused on building apps to help teachers and schools.” We will be participating as developers and working on an app that will be helpful for teachers. We have some ideas of our own, but if you are an educator or a teacher and would like to submit an idea for consideration, you can share your idea on their website at their Educator’s Wish List.

The hack-a-thon will take place at Digital Harbor High School on November 12 and 13. We are thrilled to be a part of this exciting event.

You can read all about the event on the event website at www.educationhackday.org. If you are a teacher or educator with an idea for an app that could be helpful to you in the classroom, your students, or your school consider submitting your idea. You could win some great prizes if your idea is chosen to be worked on over the weekend.